"Run 31. Left foot rebound piston fired at full pressure on a level, dry floor. Pilot uninjured. Crates not."
From Atlas-0 Test Log, Foundry Bay 4, Longwan (A. Rao)
Seven weeks after came to Longwan, the suit he had drawn on the back of committee minutes in Montreal was hanging in chains in Foundry Bay 4, and was sitting on its shoulder.
It was past midnight. Master Song was welding a cable duct along the suit's left flank, and every time he touched the torch to the seam a shower of sparks came down past 's face and died on the concrete. The suit was not finished. Its chest stood open on counterweighted arms and its thighs were still bare frame, but the shape was there: two point two metres of grey composite with gold sensor seams running down the limbs, and on the left breast, freshly stencilled, Unit Nine's crossed halberds. Above it, from every girder in the roof, hung the lanterns: 's flying lights, nearly a hundred of them, white shells the size of a man's head, dark now and waiting on their charging cords. One of them, the test unit, was lit, and it turned slowly on its cord and threw a small gold light over everything.
had a soldering iron in one hand and a flashlight in her teeth. She took the flashlight out and looked down at him.
"You look terrified of your own child, Doctor."
"I'm thinking about the power draw," said. "The dampers pull forty-two kilowatts sitting still."
"Boundary Operations pays the power bill. You're thinking about whether it'll stand up." She put the flashlight back in her teeth and bent over the shoulder joint, and said around it, "So am I."
Across the bay, behind an acoustic screen, something went pop and a smell of burnt silicon came over the top. 's voice followed it.
"Signal went in," he announced to the roof. "Signal hit the boundary. The boundary turned it into twenty milliseconds of noise that sounded suspiciously like a goat, and spat it back into my receiver, and the rectifier's gone again." He leaned round the screen, holding up a blackened square of board on a pair of pliers. "I am sending poetry into a cement mixer, ."
"The boundary has seams," said. "The maths has seams. You need to find one."
"Then find me a needle that fits it."
took the flashlight out again. "He's making progress. Yesterday the return wave didn't sound like a goat. It sounded like an angry kettle. That's an architectural upgrade."
"I am surrounded by comedians," said, and went back behind his screen.
Master Song lifted his mask. He was a small man of sixty with burn scars up both forearms, and he had said perhaps forty words to in seven weeks. He looked up at the suit, and down at , and then up at on the shoulder.
"Tomorrow it walks," he said, and flipped the mask down again.
Tomorrow came with a deadline attached. 's transport left for the airfield at six that evening, and she wanted a hard status before she went.
Lieutenant Wu, Unit Nine's test pilot, was a narrow, cheerful man who had been dropped into three live collapse zones and spoke about each of them as if it had been a mildly disappointing restaurant. He climbed the gantry ladder in a compression skin, and the suit's chest swung open for him, and he fitted himself into it. noticed that he had to hunch to get his shoulders under the collar, and then decided not to notice.
"Neural link synchronising," said from the console. "Heart rate seventy-two. Atlas-0 taking its own weight."
The gantry chains went slack. The suit hissed, and lubricant vapour puffed out of its heels, and it stepped down onto the deck. The floor shook through 's boots.
"Stability at the pilot's skin, zero point nine eight," called Guan, the young technician at the monitoring desk.
Gu stood with his arms folded at the yellow line. "Forward three paces, Lieutenant. Then a field brace."
Wu walked. The suit moved without any of the jerk of a loader, because the damping software had spent five weeks on was reading the pressure under Wu's soles a few milliseconds before each foot came down. One step. Two. On the third, Wu dropped into a crouch and brought the forearm shields together.
The balance computer read a patch of oil on the floor as a slip into bent space. It went looking for ground that was not where it expected, so it fired the left leg's emergency rebound piston at full pressure.
Four hundred kilograms of suit left the floor sideways and flew two metres through the air in a flat, ridiculous leap and went into a stack of aluminium shipping crates. The crates went everywhere. Alarms started up on three consoles at once.
In the silence afterward, from behind the acoustic screen, came the sound of one man clapping, slowly.
"Graceful," said. "Like an eagle."
was already running. "Wu! Can you vent the reservoir? Wu!"
The crates shifted. An armoured hand pushed one off, and the suit rolled onto its side, and Wu's voice came out of the collar speaker sounding mildly interested.
"The shock damping works, Doctor. My teeth didn't rattle once. However, I believe the left foot has strong opinions about lateral movement."
Gu looked at the suit lying in the crates, and then at .
"Ten minutes to clear this," Gu said to the bay. "Then reload the software. Song, check the hip casing for cracks." He looked at his watch, and then at again. "She leaves at six."
It took three hours. Nobody left the floor. Guan brought down thermoses of black tea so strong it was bitter, and sat cross-legged on an upturned crate with a keyboard on her knees rewriting the balance code, while went up and down the deck on his hands and knees with a grease pencil. He drew arrows for the forces on the concrete where the suit's feet had been, and wrote the numbers for the grip beside them. At one point he looked up and found that Wu, out of the suit and eating a bun, was reading the floor over his shoulder.
"You've drawn me very small," Wu said, pointing at one of the stick figures. "I'm hurt."
Gu came and stood over the drawings a little after two, with a mug in his hand and his slate under his arm. He read the floor the way he read manifests, from top left.
"What's it for, Neumann?"
"Holding ground in a fold. Long enough to get people out."
"We have a procedure for getting people out." Gu drank some tea. "Read the Index, clear the area, count heads at the line. Every operator I've lost in eight years, I lost because somebody left the procedure, not because they followed it."
"And when the reading is wrong?"
"Then we wait for a second reading." Gu looked down at him. "You put a note on my board this week. The Old Workers' Stadium."
"The curve," said. He sat back on his heels. "It's the drowned stadium on the southern edge, the one in the survey. The first rupture under Old Shenzhen took half of it, and the strain should have been dying away ever since. It stopped dying ten years ago. It's been flat ever since. Strain that doesn't decay is being held there."
"That stadium has read above zero point nine eight for ten years. It is the quietest site on the coast."
"That's what bothers me."
Gu considered this, or at least appeared to. "Your note says recommend no entry pending a second pass."
"Yes."
"Nobody's entering it. It's a seep in an evacuated district. It's on the list for a ten-minute survey sweep, some time this month." He finished the tea. "When I go in somewhere, Neumann, I go in on the numbers. I don't go in on a feeling about a curve."
"It isn't a feeling. It's a curve."
Gu nearly smiled, and stopped himself, and walked off toward the crates to see what Song had found in the hip casing.
At half past three the suit walked forty metres, braced, turned, and walked back, and did not leave the ground. saved the code twice, and then a third time on a separate drive, and then took the stylus out of her hair and pointed it at Guan.
"Now the part that actually works. Bring up the racks."
The lanterns came down out of the roof on their cords and unclipped themselves one by one.
They had no wings and no hardpoints. Each was a white six-sided shell of heat-proof resin with a ring of ducted fans around its waist and an amber diode at its heart, and they rose off their cords with a sound no louder than wind in dry bamboo and spread out under the girders. As they found their height they lit. had tuned them to the deep warm gold of the paper lanterns people floated on the Longwan canals at the autumn festival, and she had not let anyone talk her out of it.
They found their places by feeling for each other. Where the air under the roof was dead and still they drifted apart; where the exhaust duct pushed up a draught they bunched together, pulsing. In a minute the whole bay was lit gold from above, and the oily puddles on the floor held the light, and the presses and the chains and the half-wrecked crates looked like something else.
"How many?" said.
"Ninety-six." did not look away from her screen. "Four shells cracked in the autoclave because somebody didn't watch the cooling curve."
"I apologised, Engineer Rao," Guan said.
"Apologies don't replace boron-nitride resin, Guan." But she was smiling.
had come out from behind his screen with a length of wire still in his teeth. He took it out.
"It looks like someone brought the street inside," he said.
"In a fold you lose the horizon," said. "The eyes lie first, and then the inner ear, and people freeze because they can't find down. If the drones hold their lattice, they give survivors a ground. They show you where the space is still flat."
"And if something in there wants a fight," said, "they can dive into the heart of the collapse and fire their coils all at once. Beauty with teeth. My specialty."
Boots on the iron stairs. Everyone heard them and nobody turned round until they stopped.
Colonel was on the bottom landing in her transit uniform, the high collar fastened, a travel bag over one shoulder. She looked up into the lanterns for some time.
"Lanterns," she said.
"Mapping and illumination swarm, Colonel," said, standing up straighter without letting go of the console. "Linked to Atlas-0. They fly on their own if they lose the suit."
walked across the floor to the suit, which was back in its chains, and put two fingers on the breastplate over the halberds.
"You thickened this."
"Five millimetres over the core," said. "A sideways tear could have reached the pilot."
"Good." Her fingers stayed on the metal. "Gu."
"Colonel."
"Geneva opens in thirty-six hours. The Federation wants to close the shipping lanes through every danger zone in the Pacific, and our rescue corridors with them, and Ashford is leading their delegation, so it will take five days. A week at most." She took her hand off the suit. "While I'm gone, Gu holds tactical command. Southern canal watch stays at Level Two. No deep entries. Nothing experimental."
Then she turned to .
"Atlas-0 is not cleared for field operations."
"The balance code is stable as of this afternoon," said. "Forty-eight hours in the simulator with the full swarm, and..."
"It fell over on a dry floor this morning."
"That was one setting in the damping. We've corrected it. Colonel, in a fold, time is seconds. If a team gets cut off behind a closing boundary..."
"Then Gu runs standard recovery." She came closer, so that she had to look up at him, and she did not seem to mind. "You are an Accord civilian on loan to this command. Your value to Longwan is your model. Your forecasts stay in the control room, giving coordinates to my operators."
The bay had gone quiet. At the lathe, Master Song had stopped filing. Behind his screen was holding a soldering iron in the air, motionless, over nothing.
"Promise me, Dr. Neumann. Atlas-0 does not leave this bay. And you do not leave this base."
looked past her, up at the suit. Its chest was open on the counterweights, and from where he stood he could see straight into the cockpit: the harness, the yoke, the moulded collar. He had drawn that collar in Montreal on drafting film at two in the morning, and when the Coalition machinists asked him for dimensions he had measured the only body in the room.
"You have my word, Colonel."
looked at his face for a second or two, and nodded once.
"Keep the city quiet, Gu."
"Safe flight, Colonel."
She went out through the north lock. The pressure doors ground shut behind her, and the draught from the corridor stopped, and the lanterns, which had all leaned a little toward the door, slowly righted themselves.
Gu stood looking at the closed doors for a moment. Then he switched his slate off with his thumb. "Get some sleep, Neumann. Song, lock the hoist. Guan, cut the feed to the racks." He walked out to the ready rooms without looking at the suit.
let out a long breath and came and stood at the rail beside .
"Well," she said. "That was cheerful."
"She's right. The code's raw. If space tore under him, the balance would spin Wu like a top."
"Wu was never going to be the pilot, ." She said it quietly, under the noise of Song packing up his files. "I seated the neural weave yesterday. The harness isn't set for his reach. The yoke's two and a half centimetres too deep for him, and the collar is cut for narrow shoulders."
He did not say anything.
"I'm not an idiot," said.
"You can calculate where the wall will break," said at last. "You can see it on a screen an hour before it goes. And then what, you blow a whistle from three kilometres away and watch? Somebody has to go there. Somebody has to hold the wall."
"You cannot hold a metric collapse with your bare hands, ."
He did not answer that either. Guan keyed the recall, and above them the lanterns began to come down out of the roof, ninety-six small gold lights sinking toward their cradles, slowly, one at a time, each going dark as it seated. watched the last one fall the final metre and settle into its cradle with a pneumatic click, and then there was only the hard white strip light on the suit.